Practical advice for businesses and the future of Hybrid Cloud

The future of hybrid cloud

Cloud is continuing to evolve and we do not doubt that we will see further growth and development in this area in the coming months and years.

In this 3-part blog series, Systal CTO John Bidgood shares his experience on the most common questions we see on the challenges and pressures that senior managers face when trying to implement a hybrid cloud structure. Hybrid Cloud being the prevalent solution that most IT departments are now implementing as they adopt a cloud first strategy. Part II of this series looked at cloud security and readiness with part I considering the most common mistakes and pressures.

Managing the seamless integration between legacy IT, cloud and Internet Service Providers is the biggest challenge in long term hybrid cloud planning. To provide the optimum operational IT solution, companies have to find the ideal compromise between in-house and external skills, and have plans in place in case something does go wrong.

There is a big difference between purchasing ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS) and ‘Platform as a Service’ (PaaS), in terms of both levels of integration and multi-site resilience. Business continuity planning is key. Many Service Managers are surprised when things go wrong, and a single point of failure is identified only after the event has occurred. A traditional business recovery service might not be needed in terms of physical hosting, but the process and tools are still required to test and implement a recovery situation.

This means that companies should be on the lookout for potential integration partners as well as individual partners who would perform the roles traditionally filled by a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) and an Internet Service Provider (ISP). This may even extend to companies performing Security, Incident and Event Management (SIEMs) to secure the overall end-to-end service. Ideally these potential integration partners are technology and vendor agnostic.

Predictions for the future:

Rise in Multi Cloud use

We will see growth in companies choosing to use more than one cloud. Currently growth in companies using more than one cloud is fairly modest. Most organisations will find they need more than just one cloud to meet their needs.

Portable Data

One of the main concerns that comes along with the use of public cloud is the loss of total control over the company’s data, and tying the company into a long and potentially costly contract with particular cloud vendors. Companies try to avoid vendor lock-in by making applications and data more portable between different types of cloud.

Increased Private Cloud use

More use of private cloud as we see organisations try and get more control over their public cloud spend. A large number of organisations seem to find when they migrate to public cloud they overspend. This is often due to mismatched application requirements due to poor forecasting. The frustration of overspending might mean increasingly applications are migrated to private cloud to gain better visibility and control over IT costs.

Maximising Application Mobility

One of the benefits of a multi cloud deployment is the greater flexibility to move applications to the right cloud environment in minutes.

However as more and more cloud resources are consumed and different types of cloud are adopted, the operation becomes more complex to deploy and manage.

In the future it’s therefore likely that we will see solutions that help reduce this complexity.

One such example will be tools that take into account the complex service and cost decisions of moving to one cloud service or another i.e. a “Broker”. Allowing the business to make instant decisions on application hosting options.

Once decided where to host, an overall orchestrator that integrates with the various types of cloud/ vendors will then automatically provision those resources. All of this is done within an online portal by the business with no actual interaction with the IT department.

Over time, these tools will provision resources such as CPU, memory or bandwidth automatically before an actual outage occurs. Thus, improving the service levels for those resources. Equally if over provisioning has occurred the resources can be reduced further optimising the cost base for cloud.

If you are interested in deploying a hybrid cloud strategy for your business or would just like to find out more about what we do – get in touch with us today.